FPGA-based HW/SW co-simulation system for mixed-signal circuits

The integration of mixed signal circuits in Systems on Chip is a trend in modern systems and applications with important challenges. In particular, the simulation of this kind of systems is a very time-consuming process that is becoming more and more complex due to the size of current designs. This paper describes a HW/SW co-simulation environment for mixed-signal circuits. The analog components are simulated in an electrical simulator while the digital components are prototyped on a programmable logic device. Experiments with a system based on a Xilinx Zynq-7000 device are presented. This device contains a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor in charge of analog simulations and Programmable Logic (PL) for digital emulation. A digitally controlled DC/DC power buck converter has been chosen as a reference circuit in order to evaluate the proposed system in terms of speed and accuracy.